The Yahoo no-work-from-home brouhaha had working moms up in arms last week. Professional women with children had been dealt a blow, they said. Oh, and as one writer reminded us, it’s an issue for working dads, too.

Okay, but what about all the single people? And all the people without kids? We need to stop acting like they’re not part of the work-life conversation.

Whether it’s our pets or our parents, our health or our education, there are many facets of our lives besides children that, thanks to work, get short shrift. Recent research found that work’s interference with family obligations explained less than 15 percent of the differences in participants’ responses about their job satisfaction and mental wellbeing. “Work interferes with your ability to form romantic relationships, it interferes with friendships, it interferes with your health,” says Ann Marie Ryan, a professor at Michigan State University and one of the study’s authors. “We make a value judgment on which is more important, but in the long term, managers need to talk about caring about everyone’s work-life balance.”

Comments

We have people working 16 hour days, 7 days a week and then on call because we have 1 person doing the work of 4 people. If employers were only permitted to work people 8 hours a day, 5 days a week, more people would have employment and the people who were working would be able to have a life.